Another week! Most decidedly she had a sense of the monstrous humor of the thing. If she could see it that way she was saved. He had not the heart to kill that happy mood by a coarse refusal; it would have been like grinding his heel on some delicate, struggling thing just lifting its head into life.
Besides, she had really touched him. His legs, as Miss Tancred had observed, were a little long, otherwise Durant had the soul and the physique of a tamer of horses. The sight of Polly filled him with desire that was agony and rapture; he saw himself controlling the splendid animal; he could feel her under him, bounding, quivering, pulsating, he himself made one with every movement of her nervous, passionate body. It was too much. Beside that large, full-blooded pleasure, his scruples showed colorless and light as air.
That happened on a Friday. He had only two clear days more. He found himself seriously considering the desirability of staying over Monday.
VII
As ill-luck would have it Saturday was a wet day, and Durant, instead of riding the mare, was wandering aimlessly about the house. He had finished all the books in his bedroom and was badly in want of more. He knocked up against Frida Tancred in a dark passage, apologized, and confided in her. As usual she was sorry for him.
"I'm afraid we haven't many books; but you'll find some of mine in here." She opened a door as she spoke, and passed on.
Durant found himself in a room which he had not yet investigated. It was somewhat bare as to furniture; it struck strange to his senses as if he had stumbled into another world; in some occult way it preserved a tradition of travel and adventure. The bookcase he came to inspect was flanked by a small cabinet of coins and curios—Italian, Grecian, Egyptian, and Japanese; the walls were hung with bad landscapes interspersed with maps.
One of these, an uncolored map of Europe, attracted his attention. It was drawn by hand in Indian ink, a red line and accompanying arrow heads followed the coast and strung together such inland places as were marked upon the blank. The line started from Southampton and reached the Mediterranean by the Bay of Biscay; it shot inland to the great cities of Italy, returning always to the sea. It skirted Greece, wound in and out of the Ionian islands, touched at Constantinople, ringed the Bosporus and the Black Sea, wheeled to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then swept wildly up the north of Russia to Archangel and the Arctic Ocean; thence it followed the Scandinavian coast-line, darted to Iceland, and dipped southward again to Britain by way of the Hebrides. Off Queenstown the arrowheads pointed west, winged for the Atlantic. He found the same red line again on a blank map of Asia heading for India by China and Japan. An adventurous, erratic line, whose stages were now the capitals of the world, and now some unknown halting-place in the immeasurable waste. And what on earth did it mean? Was it the record of an actual journey, or some yet untraveled visionary route?
But it was not these things alone that gave the room its fantastic and alien air. What dominated the place was the portrait of a woman, a woman who had Frida's queer accented eyebrows and Frida's eyes, with some more fiery and penetrating quality of her own, something more inimitably fine and foreign. The portrait (which struck Durant as decidedly clever) was signed by some unknown Russian artist, and he recognized it as that of Frida's mother, the lady of the landscapes. He wondered if it was the demon of ennui that had driven poor Mrs. Tancred to the practice of her terrible art, if she had had a spite against Coton Manor, which she vented by covering its walls with bad pictures.
He turned to the bookcase. Frida's library offered him an amazing choice of polyglot fiction. It contained nearly all Balzac and the elder Dumas, Tolstoi and Turgenieff, Björnsen and Ibsen, besides a great deal of miscellaneous literature, chiefly Russian and Norwegian. Here and there he came across some odd volumes of modern Greek. A whole shelf was devoted to books of travel; grammars and dictionaries made up the rest. Miss Tancred's taste in books was a little outlandish, but it was singularly virile and robust. He had been prepared to suspect her of a morbid pedantry, having known more than one lady in her desperate case who found consolation in the dead languages. But Miss Tancred betrayed no ghoulish appetites; if she had a weakness for tongues, she had also the good taste to prefer them living.